Dr. B. Kathiresan.
M.A, M.Phil, PGDTE, PGDTS, B.Ed, P.hD
Associate Professor & Head
Department of English
Thiruvalluvar University, Serkkadu, Vellore.
Most critics and anthologists of the new
historicism cite the year 1980 as the beginning of
new historicism as a theory and critical practice.
There is a good evidence to support this –
namely the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s
Renaissance Self-Fashioning, and of Louis
Montrose’s essay ‘Eliza, Queen of Shepheardes’,
both of which are seminal works in the
elaboration of new historicist methods of anlysis.
What is New Historicism ?
It is a mode of critical interpretation which
privileges power relations as the most
important context for texts of all kinds.
It treats literary texts as a space where
power relations are made visible.
A New Historicist looks at literature in
a wider historical context, examining
both how the writer's times affected the
work and how the work reflects the
writer's times, in turn recognizing the
current cultural contexts which colour
critic's conclusions.
Goal
To understand intellectual history
through literature and Literature
through its cultural context.
Examination of literature is tainted by
its own culture & environment.
New historicism aims to show that
each era or period has its own
conceptual and ideological
frameworks, that people of the past
did not understand concepts like ‘ the
individual’, ‘God’, ‘reality’ or ‘gender’ in
the same way that we do now
New historicism has been most useful
to the discipline of literary studies in
exploring the relationship between
literature and history, and in
demonstrating the ideological and
political interests operating through
literary texts.
New historicism follows the history of
ideas.
Understand literature through history and
literature through cultural context, surrounding
the historical event.
Every piece of literature is a result of a historical
event, that created it.
History of literary text is found within the socio-
cultural & political condition surrounding its
conception and interpretation.
- Louis Montrose.
Any literary work has time, place and
a historical event as its key
components. These key elements can
be deciphered from the literary text
even if the elements are not clearly
depicted by a writer in his/her work.
New Historicism acknowledges not
only a work of literature that is
influenced by its author's times and
circumstances, but also the critic's
response to the work which is also
influenced by his/her environment,
beliefs, and prejudices.
A formative study for new
historicism was Claude Levi-
Strauss’s recognition that culture is
a self-regulating system, just like
language, and that a culture polices
its own customs and practices in
subtle and ideological ways.
For new historicists this recognition
has been extended to the ‘self’. It is
complex because of the fact that the
self polices and regulates its own
desires and repressions. This
removes the need for power to be
repressive
No physical or military force need to
be deployed or exercised for power to
have operated effectively in the
interests of dominant ideological
systems when the self, ideologically
constructed, will reproduce hegemonic
operations.
New historicism often makes for grim
reading with its insistence that there is no
effective space of resistance. Because no self,
group or culture exists outside language or
society, and because every language and
society are self-policing, hegemonic systems,
there is no possibility of resistance emerging
unchecked. This is not to say that there is no
resistance, or, as it is more usually termed in
new historicist writing, subversion.
But subversion is always produced in the
interest of power, according to new
historicists.
Stephen Greenblatt writes subversion as ‘
the very condition of power’ in his famous
essay called ‘Invisible Bullets’. Power needs
to have subversion, otherwise it would be
without the opportunity to justify itself,
and to make itself visible as power.
Power’s pervasiveness is certainly a
shared assumption among new
historicist critics, and this they borrow
from Foucault, when he claimed in
1981 that ‘power is everywhere; not
because it embraces everything, but
because it comes from everywhere.
It is important to recognise that for
new historicists the nature of power
may remain the same but the form
that it take will vary.
New historicists often seek to identify
what forms power takes as it changes
from one period to another –
(borrowed from Foucault) (or) Paul
Hamilton refers to it as, ‘ the repetition
of power through different epistemes’.
Episteme is a concept which new
historicists borrow from Foucault.
Foucault explains the concept in the
preface to The Order of Things as
similar to a period of history, but
referring not to historical events but to
the character and nature of
‘knowledge’ at a particular time.
Since new historicism expands most
of its energies on identifying and
exposing these different historical
epistemes, and the historical evolution
of conceptions of the state, the
individual, culture, family, etc., it is
easy to see how it has represented for
many commentators a turn to history.
The new historicist critics were, for
the most part, intent on using literary
texts as equal sources with other texts
in the attempt to describe and
examine the linguistic, cultural, social
and political fabric of the past in
greater detail
Anthropology and History
For new historicists, approaching the sign
systems of the past was analogous with
anthropologists approaching the sign
systems of another culture.
In one way, new historicism attempts to
conduct anthropological studies as well as
historical or literary studies, in the sense that
its practitioners are more usually interested
in the encounter between one culture and
another, as well as being aware of their own
cultural distance from the past.
A cultural distance lies between the observer and
his objects of study, and this distance for new
historicists must be accounted for and negotiated
rather than evaded or ignored. Partly this is a
lesson learned from Edward Said’s Orientalism, a
rudimentary work in post-colonial studies, one
aspect of which is the point that anthropologists,
scientists, historians and writers of all kinds were
complicit in forming and perpetuating the
discourse of imperial domination.
For example, when studying Shakespeare's Merchant
of Venice, one always comes to the question of
whether the play shows Shakespeare to be anti-
Semitic. The New Historicist recognizes that this
isn't a simple yes-or-no answer that can be teased
out by studying the text. This work must be judged
in the context in which it was written; in turn,
cultural history can be revealed by studying the work
— especially, say New Historicists, by studying the
use and dispersion of power and the marginalization
of social classes within the work. Studying the
history reveals more about the text; studying the text
reveals more about the history.
New historicism is engaged in the
process of renewing our images of the
past, of revisiting the past.
New Historicism acknowledges and
embraces the idea that, as times
change, so will our understanding of
great literature.
Cultural materialism
It is a school of thought associated with New
Historicism.
Like new historicism, cultural materialism
privileges power relations as the most
important context for interpreting texts, but
where new historicists deal with the power
relations of past societies, cultural materialists
explore literary texts within the context of
contemporary power relations.
According to cultural materialists,
texts always have a material function
within contemporary power structures.
For cultural materialists, literary texts
behave in a direct and meaningful way
within contemporary social and
political formations.
Literature and History
New historicism and cultural
materialism share a common
preoccupation with the relationship
between literature and history, and
share an understanding of texts of all
kinds as both products and functional
components of social and political
formations.
Many previous critical approaches to
literary texts assumed that texts had
some universal significance and
essential ahistorical truth to impact,
new historicist and cultural materialist
critics tend to read literary texts as
material products of specific historical
conditions.
In the eyes of new historicist and cultural
materialist critics, texts of all kinds are the
vehicles of politics insofar as texts mediate
the fabric of social, political and cultural
formations. This view is evident in the
work of new historicist and cultural
materialist critics who read historical
context through legal, medical and penal
documents, anecdotes, travel writings,
ethnological and anthropological
narratives and, of course literary texts.
They refuse to see literary texts
against an overriding background of
history or to see history as a set of facts
outside the written text.
To a new historicists or cultural
materialist critic, history is not
objective knowledge which can be
made to explain a literary text.
